The Berggruen Prize

The Berggruen Institute seeks to identify and nurture new ideas that have the potential to shape a better human future. We are committed to science as a source of knowledge and innovation and to philosophy as a source of critical perspective and deeper understanding of the place and role of humanity in the world.

Each year we offer the Berggruen Prize, a $1 million award that recognizes humanistic thinkers whose ideas have helped us find direction, wisdom, and improved self-understanding in a world being rapidly transformed by profound social, technological, political, cultural, and economic change.

While modernity has produced a dramatic expansion of knowledge, it has not delivered a commensurate increase in our understanding of our shared human condition. We believe that philosophy, broadly understood as the disciplined intellectual pursuit of wisdom, has a key role to play in making our complex reality more comprehensible and to prepare us to make wiser choices about our future.

Last year’s inaugural recipient of the Berggruen Prize was the distinguished Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, whose work urges us to see humans as constituted not only by their biology or their personal intentions, but also by their existence within language and webs of meaningful relationships.

The Berggruen Institute welcomes nominations of thinkers whose ideas have both intellectual depth and long-term social and practical value across nations and cultures.

Kwame Anthony Appiah – Professor of Philosophy and Law at New York UniversityLeszek Borysiewicz – Vice Chancellor of the University of CambridgeAntonio Damasio – Director of the Brain and Creativity Institute at the University of Southern CaliforniaAmy Gutmann – President of the University of Pennsylvania Amartya Sen – Nobel Laureate, Professor of Economics and Philosophy at Harvard UniversityAlison Simmons – Professor of Philosophy at Harvard UniversityMichael Spence – Nobel Laureate, Professor of Economics & Business at New York UniversityWang Hui – Professor of Chinese Language and Literature at Tsinghua University George Yeo – Former Foreign Minister of Singapore